Word: nikita
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Thaw was in the Moscow air last week, melting the first thin layers of snow after the long months of winter. But to the 500 writers, musicians, painters and poets gathered in the Kremlin's Sverdlov Hall last week, the changing season outside only underscored Nikita Khrushchev's words of warning shouted from the platform. Khrushchev's decree to Russia's intellectuals: new ideas in Russia must remain in the deep freeze-indefinitely...
...hears," cried Nikita in his 2 1/2hour blast, "that the time has come for laissez faire, that the reins of government have been loosened . . . that everybody can do as he pleases.'' No! thundered Khrushchev. "The party implacably comes forward against any ideological vacillation. There will never be any absolute political freedom, not even under complete Communism...
...become all too clear that the recent flood of artistic expression-poetry readings before mass audiences, exhibits of modern paintings, jazz imported from abroad, books and articles about the Stalin terror-were becoming dangerous carriers of alien Western ideas, shaking the foundations of Communist society. Destalinization, touched off by Nikita Khrushchev himself at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, had gone...
...Nikita spared no group in the restless audience. Writer Ilya Ehrenburg, 72, drew scorn for the title of his 1954 novel, The Thaw, which, said Nikita, suggests political "impermanence and instability." As for Ehrenburg's memoirs, which have been running in the literary journal Novy Mir, Khrushchev remarked caustically, "one notices that he depicts everything in grim tones." Khrushchev warned the veteran Ehrenburg against "slipping into an anti-Communist position...
Then Khrushchev turned on Young Poet Evgeny Evtushenko: "He shows vacillations, instability of views ... I would like to advise Comrade Evtushenko and other men of letters that they should not seek cheap sensationalism." Everyone was aware, Nikita announced, that Evtushenko recently told a Paris audience that his poem, Babi Yar (which drew fire from the Kremlin), had been "criticized by dogmatists." Such behind-the-back remarks in foreign countries will not do, hinted the Premier: "If the enemies of our cause begin to praise you for works convenient to their purpose, then the people will justly criticize you. So choose...